Wednesday Jul 11, 2012

Oracle WebCenter
Content just got a great companion product – CARA
from Generis,
an Oracle Gold Partner. CARA is a web-based interface on top of WebCenter
Content and it provides both a high-performance / high functionality end-user
experience, as well as a full suite of configuration tools that allow you to
build a business use case for Oracle WebCenter without coding. CMSwire recently reviewed CARA and
called it “a pretty slick tool”.

Free Webinar from Generis and Oracle

John Klinke from
Oracle and James Kelleher from Generis will be running a demo of CARA for
Oracle WebCenter on 19th July 2012 at 11am Eastern Time
(USA). This demo will feature the CARA user interface and configuration layer,
focusing on the benefits to end users as well as the configuration layer and
the associated ROI savings from configuring Oracle WebCenter to meet your
requirements rather than coding.

So what does CARA offer on
top of the Oracle WebCenter? There are two main aspects.

1)A fast, efficient user interface. Slow UIs are
one of the biggest reasons that Content Management projects fail. The second
biggest reason is if the UI is “unfit for purpose” and the CARA UI has evolved
over the last few years based on direct studies with user groups. The team from
Generis spent time looking at how users work – how they create content, relate
it, push it through the lifecycle – and finding ways of reducing clicks,
showing more information on a single screen, and doing intelligent automation
based on the system predicting what users are going to do next.

2)A full configuration layer. The largest cost
involved in any Content Management project is tailoring the platform to meet
the specific business requirements. Typically this meant months of coding /
customization, with the associated testing and then upgrade headaches and cost.
CARA provides a vast range of configuration items – basically covering
everything from how the UI looks for each user through to the business rules
e.g. properties screens, folder rules, automated security and so on. In fact,
CARA has so much configuration, that Generisis
offering a zero customization policy - if customers need a new feature, it will
be added as a configurable feature available to everyone. The team from Generis
has even created “pre-packaged” configuration start points for various use
cases such as Quality Documents, Human Resources, Legal, and a range of Life
Sciences cases including eTMF, submissions / eCTD, Correspondence and
Commitment Tracking, and Change Control.

Part of the reason CARA is
so flexible is that it is a JAVA application built using the Google Web Toolkit
(which means it works in any browser). CARA is available also as a mobile
solution and in multiple languages including English, French, German, Spanish,
Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Portuguese and Polish.

Desktop-in-a-browser

When you first see CARA
open, it is pretty unusual for a web application – in fact, it looks like you
are working on a Windows machine inside your browser. You can have multiple
windows open on your screen (so you can efficiently multi-task) and you can do
things like drag and drop between windows.

Apart from the usual lists
of documents and menus / buttons, there are some other unique things about
CARA, which you won’t find in other web UIs. For example, the Widgets Panel
shows (not surprisingly) widgets of information about documents that you click
on – you can choose from several out of the box widgets, or actually build your
own through configuration – including pulling information from third party
systems via web services (think JD Edwards, Siebel, databases…). This makes the
Widgets incredibly flexible and powerful.

Also – to solve one of the
biggest problems in content management (“how do I find my stuff”), CARA has a tool
called Dimensions – it’s the ultimate replacement for either
fixed-folder navigation or running explicit searches. Basically, choose up to 5
levels of attributes by which you want to browse the repository, and each user
has their own virtual folder structure. You can pre-define dimensions for roles
or scenarios to make it easier for users to find appropriate groups of
documents or filter them by different combinations. This is probably the #1
favorite feature when we talk to users.

In the spirit of Oracle
dashboards, CARA also has its own Dashboards where you can access
reports as charts or tables, export to Excel, and so on:

All of this is underpinned
with the configuration layer which allows you to configure both the user
interface (layout, availability of functions per group and so on) as well as
the business rules (for example security / folders / audits based on attribute
value rules, properties screens, property inheritance / auto-generation). The
entire configuration is done through the CARA UI, requiring zero coding –
cutting cost and time of implementation dramatically:

Don't forget to sign up and attend the Free Webinar from Generis and
Oracle to learn more about CARA

John Klinke
from Oracle and James Kelleher from Generis will be running a demo of CARA for
Oracle WebCenter on 19th July 2012 at 11am Eastern Time (USA). This
demo will feature the CARA user interface and configuration layer, focusing on
the benefits to end users as well as the configuration layer and the associated
ROI savings from configuring Oracle WebCenter to meet your requirements rather
than coding.